


He Is the One Who Grabs the Sun

by ishougen



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: #symbolism, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Feels, Gen, M/M, People have funny names because I'm a nerd
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-09 22:02:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4365809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishougen/pseuds/ishougen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sol's life has had one purpose: to prepare him for his inheritance of the Mortan family empire. But Sol wants nothing to do with his father or his corporation. When a chance meeting with the face of death sets him on a new path, Sol learns that there is more to life than rich and poor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I blame everything on Tane/the MMFR skype group/me being trash. Also, I'm planning to update this once per week, so please look forward to more lizard boy adventures in the near future ♥

Sol had never been able to sit still. As an infant, he couldn’t be kept in a high chair for more than ten minutes for fear of him tipping it over. When he was seven, he’d constantly run away from the nanny, hiding behind bushes in the garden or beneath the queen-sized bed in the second guestroom. It only got worse as he entered adolescence, his feet finding their way onto bikes, then skateboards, then gas pedals. He just needed to move. It wasn’t a choice.

So he sat, trying not to fidget, on the straight-back mahogany chair his father’s interior designers had picked out for the dining room. He tried not to play with his soup spoon or his salad fork as he waited for Ace, their butler, to serve dinner. He tried not to get up and run from the imported linen tablecloth, from the fifty-year-old scotch, from the impending sense of doom he got whenever he had to eat with his father.

For once, he succeeded.

At the other end of the table, his father sipped at a glass of water, an expression of false calm blanketing his face. It was a look Sol knew well: it meant he was displeased with something Sol had done.

His father placed his water back on the table, the glass clunking loudly against the wood in the otherwise silent room. “Tell me, Solares,” he said slowly, his voice low and raspy as always, the result of his body’s attempt to destroy itself. “Have you heard back from your prospective schools yet?”

Sol felt his lip curling and he fought against it; it would only make his father angrier. Joseph Maximus Mortan was not a man to be trifled with. Still, he took his time studying the pattern on the tablecloth, waiting until he could practically feel his father’s rage simmering from across the table before he opened his mouth. “Yes, sir.” He didn’t mean to sound sullen, but it was his default tone whenever he had to speak to Joe.

“And?” his father prompted, raising an eyebrow. At least, Sol thought he raised an eyebrow. He was very busy avoiding eye contact with the man.

Sol didn’t reply. They both knew the answer. They both knew that Joe was bringing it up because he’d had Ace check the mail before Sol could get a chance to steal the letters and destroy them. They both knew that nobody wanted Sol, that nobody wanted a kid with shitty grades and an even shittier track record, that nobody cared who your dad was when you clearly couldn’t give two craps about your education.

There was a heavy, dramatic sigh from across the table. “Your future isn’t going to figure itself out, Solares. When are you going to start taking things seriously?”

This time, Sol’s lip really did curl. He kept his mouth shut, though, knowing that nothing he said would matter. Joe always got what Joe wanted. He had just resigned himself to another evening of contempt and ridicule when a sudden bang made his head jerk up in surprise.

His father had apparently slammed his fists onto the tabletop, because his cutlery had gone everywhere and his glass had tipped, spilling water all over the thousand-dollar-tablecloth. His eyes were wild, his normally composed expression now contorted with rage. Sol had seen him angry before, but never like this.

“You’re an adult now, Solares Chromius Mortan. You can’t ignore your responsibilities. When it’s your job to run the company – ”

Now it was Sol’s turn to slam his fists on the table. He rose in his chair to lean over the table, staring his father in the face at last, and spat out, “I’m not going to run the company. I’ve told you that a thousand times!”

Joe’s face softened, but all of the anger seemed to seep from his skin into his eyes. “And I’ve told you just as many times that you’ll no longer be part of this family if you don’t do as you’re told.”

Sol grit his teeth and sat down heavily, expelling air through his nose in distaste. When he replied his voice was tight, almost choked with the effort needed to keep it steady. “You can’t force me to do anything.”

The corners of Joe’s eyes crinkled up, and a loud, long laugh built up in his chest before bursting across the room, hitting Sol like a slap to the face. He laughed for a good two minutes, until he was coughing, until there were tears in his eyes. Sol wanted to grab his steak knife and throw it at him.

“My boy,” Joe said, his voice dripping with disdain, “tell me that after I take your eating privileges away.”

Sol went quiet. He knew his father wasn’t beyond such measures; cruelty was as intrinsic to him as blood and water.

“Now,” Joe continued, “about your schooling. Seeing as you’ve squandered every opportunity I’ve given you – ”

Sol snorted, but went quiet when Joe glared at him.

“ – I believe the only option I have left is to simply choose for you.” Joe sat back, studying Sol carefully, his eyes narrowing. There was a pause, and then: “You’ll be attending the Citadel School of Business.”

Sol balked. “No fucking way! If you think I’m going to hang around a bunch of posh pricks all day – ”

Joe slammed his fists down again and stood up suddenly, towering over the table and glaring down at Sol. “You will go where I tell you and you will like it.”

“Fuck that!” Sol was standing now too, all six feet of him shaking with rage, his hands clenched at his sides. “You can’t make me go. I’m not a kid anymore.”

“Then you are no longer welcome in this house!” Joe turned and called for Ace, his voice practically a growl now, the hatred there no longer concealed. Ace came running; he knew what that tone meant. “Throw the boy out,” Joe snarled, jabbing a finger towards Sol.

Ace didn’t hesitate. Crossing the length of the table, he placed his hand on Sol’s shoulder and said calmly, “C’mon, son. Time to go.”

Sol threw the hand off immediately, twisting away from Ace and staring at Joe with a mixture of disbelief and utter loathing. “Fuck you, old man,” he hissed. Then, with as much noise and moisture as he could muster, he hocked up a wad of mucus and spat it directly into his still-full glass of water. “And your Aqua Cola.”

Then he turned and stomped out of the house, his heart pounding with the force of a lifetime’s worth of resentment.


	2. Chapter 2

Sol stormed out through the double doors, down the front laneway, and out of the gates – someone had opened them already, on his father’s command no doubt – pointedly ignoring the stares of the servants as he stomped past them. He was practically frothing with rage; if anyone tried to stop him just then, they’d get a fist to the face.

He didn’t stop walking until his legs gave out on him. He’d gone on without thought, unaware of his surroundings, driven forward by a single, burning desire: to get as far away from his father as possible. When he finally stopped to rest, he realized he’d been walking for a good couple of hours. The sun was low on the horizon and the air was getting cooler. Some of the shops around him had started to shutter their windows and lock their doors.

Looking around, Sol felt his stomach sink. He didn’t have a clue as to where he was. Most of his life had been confined to his father’s estate on the edge of the city; on rare occasions when he was brought into town, it was usually in a private, chauffeured coach with tinted windows. The only places he knew were his boarding school, which was halfway across the state, and his father’s office towers, which he didn’t particularly want to visit. He knew next to nothing about the city itself.

Ignoring the painful throbbing in his feet, Sol started to walk again, trying to get a sense of the neighbourhood. The first thing he noticed was the smell. It wasn’t exactly rancid, but there was a lingering odour of... what was it? Sol sniffed once, then wrinkled his nose. It smelled like garbage, rust, and old plastic. It reminded him of the homeless shelters his father made him volunteer at sometimes. Looking around, he noticed the layer of dirt that coated the buildings and the broken blinds hanging in the windows. There were fast food wrappers littering the street and cigarette butts collected in the gutters. All in all, not the kind of neighbourhood Sol wanted to hang around in.

Frowning, he dug his hands into his pockets and kept walking. He’d left before he could grab his phone or extra clothes, so his only possessions were his clothes. He had his wallet, at least; he could feel it in his back pocket. Suddenly conscious of the fact that he was a rich kid in a poor area, he untucked his button-down and tugged it over his rear, hoping to hide the bulge formed by his wallet. He wasn’t in the mood to be pickpocketed.

Where was he going to stay? He didn’t know anyone who didn’t work for his father. Was there some kind of hotel around here? Without looking, he knew the answer. As reality began to sink in he trudged along more slowly, a sour expression on his face. He had nowhere to sleep or eat.

Around him, the shops kept closing, their haggard-looking owners casting wary glances at him as he passed. He hunched his shoulders and bowed his head, not wanting to attract anyone’s attention. Eventually the buildings petered out, and his feet found their way off of the pavement and onto soft, sodden grass. In front of him, brownish-green earth stretched out, breaking the vista of small storefronts. A park? Hoping to find a bench to sit on, Sol hurried past the stone entranceway, peering through the growing darkness.

There weren’t any lights, and the path was really just a dirt road where the grass had been worn down by people’s shoes. It didn’t feel like a park; there was no playground, nothing for kids, and though there were what looked like monuments here and there, they were too small to mark important figures or events. The place seemed downright gloomy. Frowning, Sol veered off the path to approach the nearest statue he could see, though it seemed to be little more than an unremarkable slab of rock stuck straight into the ground.

He didn’t realize what it actually was until he’d reached out and traced his fingers over the engraving on the stone’s surface.

_In loving memory..._

Sol jumped back as though he’d been burned, heart in his throat, terror dawning on his face. This wasn’t a park. This was a graveyard. He backpedalled quickly, his feet finding the path again, fear spreading through his veins. His childhood had been filled with stories of rotting hands rising from the earth, looking for beautiful young flesh to drag into the afterlife. His father hated anything to do with death. Even after Sol’s younger brother had died they hadn’t had a funeral or a service or anything; Joe had waved it away, leaving the body for the attendants to deal with. The child was just an infant, after all, Joe had said. No need to waste resources on a thing that barely existed.

Now Sol was stuck in the middle of a corpse-filled field, surrounded by everything he’d been taught to fear. He felt his breath coming short and quick, but he forced himself to calm down, to be rational. He wasn’t a child. He knew better than to believe in ghost stories. When he started to move again, though, he all but broke into a jog in his haste to escape.

He was so consumed with the urge to flee that he didn’t realize what he was running towards until he could feel fiery heat brushing against his cold skin. Frowning, he stopped in his tracks. In the distance there was some kind of flame, bright against the darkness, suspended eerily above the ground.

Cautious, Sol moved closer, keeping to the large trees that bordered the strange circle of light. It was a fire, alright, but it wasn’t floating. It was burning in a barrel, like the kind homeless people in movies always had.  Beyond the flickering light there was a shadow of a human figure dancing over the ground.

Sol balled his hands into fists, prepared to defend himself. He’d seen enough movies to know what kind of people hung around graveyards in the middle of the night. His rational side told him to stay away, to find somewhere else to spend the night, but his shivering, goosebump-ridden skin drew him towards the heat and warmth of the open flame.

The shadow morphed into a human figure as he got closer, revealing that it was actually just a kid, tall and scrawny, wearing a tattered old jacket and some beat-up cargo pants with more pockets than anyone could ever possibly make use of. The kid was dancing around and singing a weird, tuneless song, more noise than music, his voice high and clear.

Taking a breath, Sol prepared himself for a fight and called out in his most commanding, authoritative voice: “Hey!”

The figure stopped dancing immediately. It turned to look at him. Sol felt his heart racing in his chest, regret beginning to consume him – but before he could run away, the kid rushed towards him and stared him in the face, leaving no more than three inches between them.

Silence stretched across the gap, filling up the minutes. Sol could hear his heart pounding in his ears. This close, he could see that the kid’s face was really messed up. His eyelids were dark, almost black, as though he’d coated them in eyeshadow; his nose was blacked, too; and his lips – his lips made Sol shudder. They looked like they were scarred purposefully to resemble teeth, with small, vertical lines crossing the entire expanse of the pale flesh. The kid looked like a living skeleton.

“Hey!” the skeleton finally responded, far too loud for how close they were. Unnervingly, his mouth had split into a wide grin.

Sol opened his mouth, but then he realized he didn’t know what to say, so he closed it again. He hadn’t exactly thought this through. Nervously, his licked his lips. His eyes wandered past the kid’s shoulder and towards the fire, burning bright and hot against the darkness.

The kid blinked in confusion, then looked over his shoulder and grinned even more widely. “Oh, you wanna get warm?” he asked, not waiting for an answer before grabbing Sol’s wrist and tugging him closer to the flame.

Well, at least this skeleton boy didn’t seem dangerous, Sol thought. He was even skinnier up close: he wasn’t wearing a shirt beneath his jacket, and Sol could count his ribs. He figured he could beat him in a fight if it came to that, so he allowed himself to relax a little.

Skeleton boy didn’t seem to want to leave him in peace, though. “What’s your name?” he asked eagerly, staring at Sol with wide, curious eyes. “Mine’s Nux. Like nuts, only with an ‘x’.”

Sol hesitated for a moment, not sure what to say. Unable to come up with a good fake name, he settled on the truth – part of it, anyway. “Sol.”

“Tha’s a real shiny name,” Nux replied, bubbly as ever. He was apparently content to take whatever Sol told him as the truth.

Sol frowned a little, not sure if Nux meant that as an insult or a compliment. His father never let him learn any slang, and the boys at his boarding school all spoke properly, so he had no idea what the word meant. “Shiny?”

“Yeah, y’know.” Nux shrugged, grin still planted firmly on his face. He let go of Sol’s wrist to hold his hands up to the fire; his fingers were long and bony. “Shiny. Chrome.”

“...oh.” Sol nodded, pretending to understand. It didn’t seem to mean anything bad. Even if it did, he wasn’t in the mood to pick a fight over some kid’s choice of words. He mimicked Nux’s gesture and brought his own hands closer to the flame, his body relishing the warmth. His stomach grumbled suddenly, and he realized he hadn’t eaten dinner.

Nux shot him a look, his grin replaced by... concern? Sol couldn’t quite tell. “You hungry?” he asked.

Past the point of being too proud, Sol nodded.

“Me too,” Nux said simply, cheerful expression returning as he looked back towards the fire.

Well then. Sol couldn’t hold back a soft, weak laugh, shaking his head. Moving away from the fire a little, he sat down heavily, ignoring the slight dampness of the earth against his jeans. He drew his legs up to his chest and rested his forehead on one knee, laughing some more, the full force of his situation hitting him all at once.

No home, no family, no money save the fifty bucks stashed in his back pocket. Nowhere to go. No one to turn to. Sitting in a graveyard, surrounded by the dead, talking to a living corpse who could just as well be a hallucination –

“Hey.” Nux had come to sit next to him, unnoticed, his voice softer than before. The sound jerked Sol out of his thoughts and he looked up in surprise, his eyes wide, his cheeks wet. Oh. His laughs had turned to sobs, apparently. “You okay?”

Sol wiped at his face, scowling, though not at Nux. “’m fine,” he mumbled, looking at the ground and ignoring the pain that had filled his body.

Nux looked at him for a long moment, his eyebrows drawn together slightly. There was that expression again. Why was he worried? Sol wasn’t his friend. They didn’t even know each other.

“Y’know,” the skeleton boy said softly, glancing at the fire, “I wasn’t always a street kid.”

Sol looked at him from the corner of his eyes, still wary, but curious.

A smile played on Nux’s face as his fingers darted downwards, playing with the sparse strands of grass dotting the earth between them. “My mom an’ dad were real good folks. Took real good care of me.” He shrugged a little, and though he was smiling Sol saw something in his eyes that he recognized – something he saw whenever he looked in a mirror. “But mom got sick, an’ dad had to leave to get money.” Nux shrugged again, then looked up, grin back on his face. “But it’s okay! It’s not hard to live out here if you have friends. D’you have any friends, Sol?”

“Uh,” Sol blinked, unable to comprehend the kid’s sudden changes in mood. “Uh, no. Not really.”

Nux frowned deeply at that. “Well, that’s no good!” Shuffling closer, he reached out to take hold of Sol’s wrist, clasping their hands together. “We’re friends now. Got it?”

“Um. Yeah, okay.” Sol smiled despite himself. Nux’s cheer was infectious.

“Good!” Nux gave their hands a shake, sealing the deal, before letting go. “So, why’re you out on the street, Sol?”

Sol’s smile slid off of his face. “Got kicked out,” he replied tonelessly.

Beside him, Nux nodded sagely. “Wanna say why?”

Sol’s lips twisted, and he was quiet for a while. He had no reason to tell this Nux kid anything. Then again, he didn’t have much to lose by telling him. “Didn’t get along,” he offered.

Nux nodded again, sighing almost wistfully, his expression far too wise for someone who couldn’t be older than eighteen. Then, brightening, he declared, “I know exactly what you need!”

Before Sol could say anything Nux got up and scurried off into the dark. When he didn’t return right away, Sol began to wonder if maybe this was a bad idea – was he going to get jumped? Were there a whole group of them hiding behind the trees, waiting to prey on dumb rich kids like him? But no, there was Nux again, his shadow darting along the ground. When he got closer Sol could see that his fingers were clutched tight around the neck of a large, clear bottle.

“Don’t have a whole lot left,” he said, handing the bottle to Sol before plopping down next to him, all eager grins and excited eyes, “but there should be enough for us to share.”

Lifting the bottle, Sol examined it sceptically. “Is this... alcohol?”

“Vodka!” Nux replied enthusiastically, reaching to take the bottle back and unscrewing the cap. “Was gonna save it for a special occasion, but like, making new friends is pretty special, right?” Tipping the bottle back, Nux took a swig; then, wincing and smacking his lips, he shoved the bottle towards Sol.

For a second, Sol wanted to refuse. The rational part of his brain was saying that it was a really bad idea to get drunk with a homeless kid in the middle of a graveyard while an open flame raged next to them. But the rational part of his brain also sounded way too much like his father’s voice. So, his lips curving into a wicked grin, he grabbed the bottle and took a long, long drink. The liquid burned deliciously as it carved a path down his throat, numbing his anger and pain, making him forget everything.

“Woah,” Nux said as Sol handed the bottle back, skeleton eyes wide with awe. “Sol, dude, you’re so chrome!”

Sol just laughed, hoarse and hearty, and motioned for Nux to take his turn with the bottle. He was done living life in a cage, protected from the outside world. Now, with whatever time he had left, he was going to party with death.


End file.
